March, Geraldine Brooks

March is not at all a 'sequel', or 'companion' to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. It did hold some interesting conversations of what it could have meant for a man to go off into such an idealized war with the opinions In this, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction, Mr. March was depicted as having held as a community-serving Christian minister (although characterizing him as being vegetarian/vegan seemed a little superfluous to me, but that's just my opinion).

I sort of enjoyed the novel. This isn't even my first experience with Geraldine Brooks... but it didn't grab me the way the Pulitzer Prize Fiction winners from 2009 to 2007 did. March struck me as an interesting story, but I couldn't help but feel that using Mr. March of Little Women, versus any other family man, was merely to heighten the reader's feelings of pain and suffering, as we who are reading this novel are assumed to have been exposed to the March girls. The idealistic picture of family life they have represented in literature, either in film or the novel makes the case for sympathy and sentimentality by itself. I was shocked by the characterization of March, and the melodrama he found himself within; but only because of my reading experiences growing up with Little Women and not due to anything skillful in Brooks' writing. He honestly struck me as sort of a complaining, and oftentimes weak narrator.

The most compelling drama in the novel was for me, that of the contraband slaves, as the socio-political status of Freedmen during the war and in the early days of Reconstruction, has always struck me so gray and hopeless. Give this novel a chance, but don't expect to be as moved by this Civil War drama as I was by say, Cold Mountain.

March, Geraldine Brooks
ISBN: 0143036661